NEW HAVEN >> Four days after “The Book of Mormon” leaves the Shubert Theatre on College Street, a different don’t-miss event arrives for one night only: Christian Community Action presents Al Jarreau.

The Thursday 7:30 p.m. concert at the historic Elm City theater will feature the seven-time Grammy Award-winning jazz and R&B singer in concert with his five-person band in a fundraiser for the faith-based not-for-profit CCA, which does a lot for the local poor as it helps them toward self-sufficiency.

Jarreau’s tunes have contributed audio backdrop to a lot of mature adults’ lives since 1977, with hits such as “We’re In This Love Together” and “After All.” He’s still one of the hardest-working men in show biz at 75, chatting with us by phone from his West Coast home a day after returning from Montreux, Switzerland, where he spent a busy residency. (And he was heading out the next day for more working dates.)

“Constantly amazed, constantly grateful,” Jarreau said of his long career. “That notion of counting your blessings ... is really part of the longevity and continuing success, as well. It works that way ... it’s really kind of high-tech stuff that has to do with spiritual consciousness and how you interact with existence stuff.”

Jarreau, rarely seen over the years in Connecticut, has always been popular overseas, particularly in Europe. And that’s partly by design.

“I’m a liberal arts guy, and part of liberal arts is finding an awareness of the world community, you know?” said Jarreau, who went to a small Wisconsin liberal arts college.

“I’m not a particular history buff, but we are who we are because of where we came from,” he said, “and I want to go and visit those places. His music, he said, has helped him increase his understanding of the world as well as interact with people there. It was one of the first things he did after his first hit record in the ’70s: go to Germany and begin a long relationship that continues today with fans.

The other aspect of his popularity overseas is that jazz has been embraced by Europe for a long time.

“It’s a bigger home for jazz than America,” he said, and then repeated that notion. “... They are a very curious population in Europe that has spawned the greatest art in the world.”

Jarreau’s latest album, “My Old Friend,” came out this summer — a tribute to an early collaborator, George Duke, the keyboard pioneer, composer, singer and producer who died in 2013.

“He was one of our music masters ... (with an) across-the-board achievement legacy that is so amazing to people,” he said, referencing Duke’s work on “Soul Train,” jazz radio stations and even in Detroit with “funksters.”

“George assumed correctly that we could walk and chew gum at the same time, that we could listen to Beethoven in the morning and in the afternoon be listening to Muddy Waters and Guitar Slim. And it’s true; I do.”

Jarreau said music takes a narrow beam and focus when people get involved for money and pick a target audience (usually young people lacking a wide music background). “And we hammer away at them with the Biebers and Gagas, you know?”

Jarreau came up in the music world during the wild days of Haight-Ashbury rock and social revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He sang a memorable solo line in the star-filled “We Are the World,” performed on the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” played Teen Angel on Broadway and did the theme of TV’s “Moonlighting.”

At the Shubert in New Haven, he’ll do a variety of songs (maybe even one of his amazing scat versions of Brubeck’s “Take Five,”) — “little highlights in my career that people are fond of ... early part of my career, mid-part and later things.”

Jarreau said he’s looking forward to upcoming dates in New England, including those (like this one) supporting “organizations who understand that we have to do it — WE, you know?

“They’re headed in a different direction there in Washington. We’re losing all of our safety nets. We’ve got a group of people who are about 2 or 3 percent who have all the money and don’t want to share any of it. They won’t pay their taxes. Until we get them onboard, we gotta do it for each other.”

He said community resourcing outreach, on community gardens in particular, is a good example.

Christian Community Action, led by the Rev. Bonita Grubbs, is an ecumenical social services agency in New Haven whose mission is to provide emergency shelter and transitional housing, food, advocacy and leadership training to the needy, according to its mission statement. CCA works to encourage poor families and individuals to attain financial independence and to change systems that perpetuate underemployment and poverty. In short: social change.

Jarreau’s songs of love and compassion can be traced to his Midwest upbringing by a Seventh-day Adventist Church minister/singer father and his church pianist mother.

“I owe a lot of it to my mom and dad’s thinking about church and religion, and who we are as people walking around in Earth ‘cars’ — that’s the body. We’re more than that, but there are things that we should be doing while we’re here, and church and other philosophies of life kind of set it out. And part of helping each other and being a brother’s keeper is really important.”

Jarreau said on “a planet of people with resources, they’re endless. It’s the will to share. And if ET and God are sitting there together looking back at us on Earth, they’re going, ‘My, my, my, they have so much. Why do so few have so much, and so many have so little?’”

That thinking informs songs like “Mornin’” and “Boogie Down” — “I can be what I want to,” he said of that song, “and all I need is to get my (stuff) together ...” and can inspire kids to achieve.

Oh, and Jarreau’s line in iconic “We Are the World”? It was “... and so we all must lend a helping hand.”